A "technical issue" has hit users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, forcing an apology from owner Meta.
In a statement on the X social media platform, the tech firm wrote: "We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps... and apologise for any inconvenience".
According to Downdetector, which allows people to report problems with popular apps and websites, there was a big spike in reports of issues with Meta services around 6pm.
At 6.07pm there were 25,807 reports about Facebook in the UK and 106,401 in the US.
Meanwhile, the number of reports in the UK about WhatsApp totalled 15,565 at 6.28pm.
A message posted on Meta's X account, several hours later at 10.34pm, said the glitch had been largely fixed: "Thanks for bearing with us! We're 99% of the way there - just doing some last checks.
"We apologise to those who've been affected by the outage."
Earlier this year, a technical issue led to an outage which impacted hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users globally.
The platforms faced another outage in October, although services were largely restored within an hour.
(c) Sky News 2024: 'Technical issue' hits Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta says
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